US hires over 2,000 video gamers as air traffic controllers
8 days ago by sanitation to c/technology
female pilot voice
[most vile stream of misogynistic insults she's ever heard followed by screeching]
Very. The quick search I did indicated that 70.7% to potentially 97% of pilots are men.
Another plane is then directed into her path
"We cannot allow you to protect your data."
There should be an extension that prevents you from risking your privacy accessing an american site that does this
Then again americans wouldn't be able to access 90% of their internet so maybe it would be pointless
As an American, I would use it.
Well in this case the website itself is preventing me from risking my privacy accessing it.
Fox 21 is a local affiliate of Fox based in Duluth, MN. It’s a regional news source for Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
I seriously doubt they get enough traffic from GDPR regulated countries to retrofit their entire site to be compliant when it is targeted for a very specific audience in the US.
they don't need to retrofit their entire website. GDPR does not require the website to do anything, it requires websites to not do certain greedy things. that's all. that's the nice thing, they could just remove all the tracking code and they are compliant.
they don't need to retrofit their entire website.
Except they do, because even if they’re pretty certain their site is compliant with GDPR they’d still have to review the code to make certain it is or risk legal liability if anything isn’t.
Many small to medium organizations that aren’t operating outside of the USA chose to just block connections instead.
Is there a lot of people outside the US checking an “affiliate for the Duluth-Superior broadcast area, which covers northeastern Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin, and the western portion of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula” regularly for their news?
Yes, but also, it is sad you can automatically safely assume a news site that we only want to display our news will be handling a fuck-ton of our personal information. If it just showed the news and non-targeted ads, it wouldn't need a retrofit. GDPR wouldn't apply.
GDPR is a law with real legal consequences that protects EU citizens (EU as in European Union).
Do European citizens frequently turn to an “affiliate for the Duluth-Superior broadcast area, which covers northeastern Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin, and the western portion of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula” for their news?
Do you spouse it’s easier for a local or regional organization to set policy to block warn GDPR covered connections or have someone spend time ensuring the site is GDPR compliant for the 1s? 10s? 100s? of hits they get?
so i have a little bit of insight into this whole thing. i got a few friends who are controllers and i've been in the hiring process myself for nearly 2 years. to save you the history of the hiring process of the last few years: long. duffy "supercharged" the hiring process last year, making it take a lot less time than it used to (months instead of years).
anyway, we don't actually know if 2000 "gamers" got hired from this latest bid, they're just saying that because they were catering to gamers with the advertisement (which was majority genAI content lmao). if you applied to the bid, you're automatically a gamer.
now a few things on what this means for us and the safety of aviation. the minimum requirements are as follows: do you have a pulse? can you obtain a security clearance? do you not have any medical problems that will make you unfit to do the job? have you not taken any federally illegal drugs in the last few years? can you do a few basic math problems? if you can answer yes to all of these questions, you get hired. that's what the 2000 number is.
when you get hired by the FAA, those 2000 people don't immediately get to go control traffic at the busiest airport. all ATC candidates must go to the FAA's training academy in OKC for 3-4 months to learn how to control traffic. it's designed to train someone who doesn't even know what a plane is to the basics of controlling traffic, phraseology and proper procedures and all. not everyone makes it through the academy and is a large percent of the attrition rate for applicants.
only after all that do they go to a real facility, but not like LAX. and then they learn some more before touching live traffic.
so overall, i'm not super worried about it. only the people who are actually capable will get though and even then, it will be well over a year before they are controlling on their own if they don't fail training at their facility
So, be worried in about 6 months then?
about 6 months minimum before they're allowed to talk to real planes, a year and a half minimum after that before they are out on their own. the academy will get rid of a lot of people who truly are not cut out for this type of work, and facility training will get rid of more. tbh i'm not super worried because the job is do it by the book or find another job. if they don't do it right, they won't be talking to real traffic for very long if at all
What bogus hysteria. Do you have any idea how many people play video games? Would you expect them not to advertise a recruitment drive on television because we don’t want our air traffic controllers to just kick up their feet and watch the screens? Let’s not be idiots.
It’s far more interesting to ask why they need to advertise a recruitment drive. The profession has been losing skilled people because its high skill, high stress, high stakes, and their paycheck gets jerked around every time there’s a government shutdown. Let’s focus on that instead of clutching our pearls over them hiring people who have played video games before.
And... also... Have you seen gamers?
The comments here seem somewhat strange to me for what is likely to be a "gamer" heavy demographic. There's a lot of 'I should stop flying' or otherwise implying that people who, having games as their preferred hobby, will be bad at this. Instead, gamers tend to get really good at a few specific skills such as reaction times, pattern recognition, strategy and min/maxing, etc.
About the only thing I could think making this better would be to select for speedrunners.
That way we get livestreams for APLS - Awesome Planes Landed Safely - and also raise some money for a charity or two.
Absolutely perfect example of what I mean. You want to talk about gamers like they are this specific sub-niche of humans who are all the same.
Would you do this with movies? “People who watch movies are like XYZ and they only have a couple of skills.” What about music? “There’s a music listener in this thread and he said ABC.”
This is why I led with “do you know how many people play video games?” The gaming industry earns more annually than movies and music combined.
You have some stereotype of gamers in your brain, fine. That’s your deal. But “gamers” is just “people” these days. Including me. I’m a gamer. And I say: what bogus hysteria.
He said 3-4 months lol
For education, plus some more before real traffic
Sorry was making a joke, that under this admin, they'll push them through, kinda like they do with the rent a cops at ICE.
Please at let be the ones that are the hardcore MS flight sim nerds, they do have many who take it super serious at least.
teabagging their coworker/teammates that they just betrayed for the lols
"and they pay me for this shit lmao FUCK YOU MOM I TOLD YOU MY SKILLS WOULD PAY OFF"
You just reassured me, 100% without copyright infringements to boot!
Hey Bossman!
Fortnite..... Yeah, fuck, we dead... That'll be like eleven 9/11s💀
Best we can spare are the ones flying a hot air balloon into the control tower at unreasonable speeds.
"You were supposed to cover me, wtf and you call yourself prestige 8 on cod? I've seen bots smarter than you."
Plane Landed!
style: 4500
substance: 4500
speed: 4000
civilian health: 5000 PERFECT
rings collected: 5000 PERFECT
black box: INTACT
Grade: A
"A?! A?? wtf do you even want!? WHERE'S MY GODDAMN S-RANK!?"
throws controller
Hi guys! Welcome back. So today we're going to see if we can trigger that unsigned integer underflow bug that some of you have been talking about. As you can see here I've already got an Iberia Airbus A380 heading perfectly due West towards Null Island and, thanks to the telemetry bug we found last week that still hasn't been patched we've got it showing as a two-seater Cessna so the occupation rate is 15000% so what were going to do is get the latitude, longitude and altitude to all cross zero at the same time...
"Atlanta Center, Delta 412, descending through flight level 190, vector for runway 26 Right."
"Delta 412, copy. Hold your horses, bad connection on your end, total dial-up energy."
"Atlanta Center, American 805, five miles behind Delta 412, also requesting 26 Right."
"American 805, radar contact. Wait, you guys are practically sniffing each other's tailpipes, this spacing is absolute dogshit."
"American 805, we can go around and vector back if—"
"Nah, speedrun mode activated. Both of you cleared land 26 Right, first one down gets the lobby win! LEeeerrrooooyyyyy mmmmmmJjjeeennnkkkiinnnsssss!!!"
throws controller
Steve looked up from the corner of the tower. "What the hell, man? I didn't know you could pick me up, but what the hell? Just toss me like that? Jesus, dude, calm the fuck down!"
Leroooooooy Jenkins!!
How is "gamer" defined? Someone who has played video games? Did they also hire 2000 "readers?"
like 3/4s of the USA population plays video games these days.
but we assume here it's 'young men who play CoD/madden religiously'. I doubt many of these hires were 40+, or women.
I found a glitch. When you crash a few planes on the other runways, all the traffic has to go over a single one. Still the same traffic and points but way easier to manage
“Air traffic control, please respond. We aren’t able to see the landing strip and we might crash!”
“Sounds like a skill issue. Git gud.”
"Why isn't quick load working?"
Cool they “hired” but if they fail the tests then they won’t be hired. Which is the main issue. People fail out of the school, because it’s hard and stressful.
Yeah, that's the point though, the schools/training was massively underenrolled.
if the failure rate is 50%, you need twice as many candidates to fill the jobs. more so if it's higher.
we also desperately need more medical staff, but nobody is scrambling to hire young men for nursing and other non-doctor medical roles. they are still predominantly marketed for women
I'm glad I don't know more about aviation and human nature so I don't have to worry about this as much as it probably warrants.
People who are used to not facing real consequences, directing 200-ton metal tubes full of humans through the air above us?
Probably fine.
Being good at some computer games (not just flight simulators) is helpful in getting through the recruitment process. I'd say a mix of having good orientation and implementing and executing a strategy is required at the very least (and sticking to it, which I didn't do lol), which you definitely get/practice in games.
However the actual training process can cut those numbers dramatically, but I wouldn't be surprised if they ignored obvious red flags with some of these 'gamers' just to pump those numbers up.
Way back in the day there used to a game called Tracon, which was an air traffic control simulator. I played it a few tells and from those experiences I knew that ATC was never going to be a path for me. I caused so many midair collisions.
There are also other ATC simulation games, but it looks like that particular developer also sells professional ATC training software, so I'd kinda imagine that that "I'm really good at TRACON" might be a better standard than most ATC games in terms of someone being able to be an actual ATC.
How many "lives" are they given?
All of them. That’s their job now.
Does the game allow cheats or the ability to spawn natural disasters? I want simcity levels of control.
Look out for a hot air balloon doing a high-speed pass.
"Bio break guys. Can we just pause the air traffic for 10 mins?"
Welcome to this totally balanced game with no exploits
Jokes aside, thanks for reminding me this audio game exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Blind_Legend
Apparently there's a PC version
Fortunately I don't need to fly anywhere anytime soon
sounds like bad news
I played an ATC game on my phone. Was pretty good at it. Can I has job?
Steady on Captain Rackham. Dont want to spoil the ending now.
"Mid or I leave"
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"Seattle Approach, Cherokee 8121K, 20 southwest of Seattle VOR at 7,500, en route Arlington, request transit Class Bravo airspace."
-"LMAO, shut the fuck up *****. Why don't you get gud at being a pilot instead of being carried under tower from support every time looser?"
save